Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Fighting For LGBTQ Rights is Terrorism Now: NSPM-7 Explained w/ Ken Klippenstein

Episode Date: October 17, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!!Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 https://www.usermag.co  Welcome back to Free Speech Friday!Recently, Trump signed a little-noticed national security directive identifying a slew of views like “anti-Christian” and “anti-American” beliefs as indicators of "radical left violence" and terrorism. The directive is called NSPM-7. NSPM-7carries serious implications for freedom of speech and opens the door to dangerous levels of censorship. In NSPM-7, Trump directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies to fight his version of political violence, retooling a network of Joint Terrorism Task Forces to focus on “leftist” political violence in America. Ken Klippenstein has been covering all this. He joined me today to break down NSPM-7 and what it means for speech in America. Under the new directive, anyone expressing views that could be construed as any of the following, could be classified by the government as a terrorist:anti-Americanism,anti-capitalism,anti-Christianity,support for the overthrow of the United States Government,extremism on migration,extremism on race,extremism on genderhostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family,hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, andhostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.Ken's story: https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/trumps-nspm-7-labels-common-beliefsIf you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! https://www.patreon.com/c/taylorlorenz Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz   https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0  https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

Yeah, when I first wrote it, I said a declaration of war on the left, but then reflected on it, and it's more than just the left. This is just everyone who isn't a certain brand of conservative, I guess. This is not interpretive. This is like what they explicitly said. God only knows what the classified versions of this directive floating around in the White House are. We all know that the government has made aggressive efforts to crack down on free speech lately under the guise of cracking down on terrorism and strengthening national security. The TikTok ban falls under this along with a slew of other regulations. And recently, the independent journalist Ken Clippincine broke the story of NSPM 7, a presidential directive aimed as censoring political speech.

I mentioned this directive in one of my previous videos, but I wanted to bring Ken on today to dive deep into NSPM 7 and how directives like this are increasingly being used by the administration to censor speech and silence anyone who challenges power. Ken, welcome to free speech Fridays. Hey, Taylor, good to be with you. Okay, so give us a quick overview of what NSP. PM7 is. And what is a presidential directive? What does this directive give Trump the power to do? In a nutshell, it instructs federal law enforcement to crack down on domestic terrorism as defined by the Trump administration. And so the danger here is that NSPM 7 defines terrorism pretty broadly. And I want to talk through kind of how it defines terrorism. You reported this in your newsletter that basically they're targeting any organizations or speech or entities who speak about the following topics.

I see anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity. Can you give a sense of the type of speech that's being criminalized under NSPM 7? Yeah, so under this memorandum, you just named some of them. And she's quoting directly from the document. This is not sensationalizing or interpretation. That is right there in the memorandum. I encourage people to go read it, as well as others, like, non-traditional family views. It's just, like, so broad.

Yeah, it says hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family. And then things like support for the overthrow of the U.S. government, which I think we would all love to overthrow the U.S. government some days. Have you met American? Yeah. They hate the government. Extremism on migration. Extremism on race. Extremism on gender. I think we know what they're saying here.

And then hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality and religion. These are such incredibly broad and subjective categories. So what is the goal here? I mean, basically are federal agents just going around? homing through people's posts about these topics and seeking to put them on some terrorism watch list? Well, I'm glad you stressed earlier that this is a presidential directive distinct from executive order. And so this is articulating to all of federal law enforcement. Here's our priorities. This is what we want you to go after. And so those indicators you

were just describing, that's what the FBI, that's what ICE, that's what federal protective services, all of these federal law enforcement agencies that exist in the government, those indicators are what they're going to be looking for as signs of terrorism and to go and pursue terrorism investigations against. So not only is it very broad, this is all of government and this is a strategy directive that they're going to heed is how you get promoted, is how you'll get resources from Congress, is what you want to dedicate your attention to over the rest of the administration. It is a big picture document, not a small board thing. Got it. So basically, if you work in the federal government, you work for ICE or Homeland Security

or you're working on these sort of crackdowns on protests, you are going to focus on protests or speech or activism that challenges capitalism, challenges Christian. I guess has extremism on gender. I'm assuming that's LGBTQ rights. That sounds all pretty dystopian. I mean, how common are these directives and how much effect do they really have on, you know, the government's priorities? They're very uncommon. It's called NSPM 7 because it's only the seventh of other national security presidential memoranda that the president has put out. And often they're classified in the past. They've led to mass protest as in the case of the Jimmy Carter administration when it came out that he had a NSP related to nuclear conflict with Russia.

I wish that there is a commensurate response today. Unfortunately, the media is not paying as much attention as it did to Carter's memoranda. But in this case, we're lucky that we even know about it at all. In the case of NSPM6, we don't even know what that is. That's classified. You could go to the government website. It's just blank. But fortunately, we know what this is.

And the details are pretty hair-raising. You only listed like half of the indicators. They're like four or five others. Yeah, it's really, I mean, it's really scary. What do you think prompted Trump to pass this directive? As I understand it, based on conversation with people, in the Homeland Security Department and FBI, the Charlie Kirk assassination was kind of like a 9-11 type event for the administration. I mean, many of them knew him personally, so I'm sure that on some

personal level it was traumatic. You're saying it was their personal 9-11? Literally, yeah. And when you see how they talk about it, it's sort of emotional. And then also you have the president himself having been nearly assassinated and he's drawn connections between his own experience and Kirk. So I think part of what you're seeing is like a crash out in response to the fear that something like what happened to Charlie Kirk might happen to the rest of them and responding accordingly, which is to say, freaking out and trying to prevent anything of the sort from happening again. How are people within the administration reacting? I'm assuming somebody leaked this to you, so not everyone's supportive, but what, you know, what are people in the national security world saying about this directive?

What's striking about it is they had a lot of the same questions that you just had and that I frankly have too, which is how are you going to implement like these huge sweeping categories? He's like, what do we actually do with this? That's not to say that they won't find a way. I mean, they just arrested someone in Chicago in a protest recently. And there was like an announcement that law enforcement put out saying someone suspected of being an antifa. So they're clearly like hearing this stuff because, again, this sets the incentive structure

around which you will be promoted and you'll get more resources if you can make cases that adhere to these different categories. But at least at some of the higher levels, people have the same questions we do, which is, this is crazy. How do we do this? Well, you also reported that the FBI and department, of Homeland Security, I guess, are warning police across the country that protests against ICE or the Trump administration are essentially a cover for terrorism. How is this playing out as well? I mean,

do you think there's going to be increased surveillance at protests? And can people be arrested now under the guise of this new directive? There's absolutely going to be more surveillance, not just in the part of federal government, but I mean, you see leadership outside of the Trump administration, for example, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson comparing them to terrorists. And then the, I think it was the majority whip compared the upcoming. no Kings protest to be held on Saturday. What is it pro-terrorist or something like that? Which is so, it's the most like lib like resistance wine mom protest ever. Yeah, totally. And that's one of the most striking parts of this. And it goes back to what you were saying before about

the indicators, which is their idea of extremism is perhaps not the rest of that country's idea of what constitutes extremism. It seems to be basically anyone who isn't MAGA as far as I can tell. You talk about in your original piece on NSPM 7, the idea of pre-crime and how since Bush and 9-11, there's this idea of preventing terrorism before it happens. Like it's not enough to just investigate acts of terrorism or bring terrorists to justice after they've committed terrorism. They want to do this preemption. So can you talk about that like strategy?

And it seems like that would lead to the arrest or prosecution or certainly targeting of a lot of really lawful speech of people that have not yet committed terrorism because you can't crack down on anything under the guise of pre-crime or pre-eemption to terrorism. Yeah, this goes right to your point about free speech and why this is such an important question to anyone who cares about the First Amendment, because how do you prevent a crime that hasn't happened yet, since there's no crime to go and prosecute? You have to look for those indicators we were talking about before, which is speech by definition. It is what are people saying that we associate with a future crime? And that's not unique to the Trump administration. This is inherent in every

counterterrorism approach, which the government has embraced wholeheartedly in an institutional way since 9-11 in particular. And if you look at NSPM 7, the authorities that it activates, are what are called Joint Terrorism Task Forces, which exist in every state across the country, thousands of federal law enforcement agencies, many FBI, but other federal agents and local law enforcement who are deputized into these JTTFs, is what they call them for short. And they're allowed to operate anywhere, unlike the National Guard who are restricted by Posse Cometatis and other rules that exist. These guys can go and do things that the military cannot. And so those are going to be the implementers on the ground. And again, they're looking for speech because that is how they think that they're going to be able to

prevent something. All of these crackdowns are so incredibly vague. I mean, not only is just like any criticism of, you know, American family values, like that sort of broad terminology, I feel like could apply to anything. What even are American values? It seems like that's not defined. But it reminds me of Trump's earlier designation of Antifa as this terrorist group, which they then seem to, I guess, say that they were cracking down.

I saw somebody say, maybe it was Cash Patel or someone was giving an announcement on television that they had gotten like the girlfriend of the founder of Antifa, which is hilarious because there absolutely is no founder of Antifa. So it just seems like all of these, like, national security directives are just so incredibly broad. Yeah, and I think that's part of why this hasn't garnered the attention. It should. I'm really glad that you're giving me a chance here to talk about this.

Because I think on its face, it sounds so absurd and outrageous that people are kind of like, this has to be sensationalized. But, like, most of what we're saying is right there from the document. I encourage people to go and look at it. And just because it's not clear what the legal authority is that they're going to use, doesn't mean they're not going to do it. That's something else I want to stress because I saw so much media reportage in response to, particularly the designation of Antifa as a domestic terror group.

Oh, you can't designate a domestic terror group. Nothing's going to happen. That's not true. Just because you can't charge someone with domestic terrorism doesn't mean the FBI can't open an investigation. Doesn't mean they can't monitor those speech indicators that we were just talking about. It just means that they might need a charge a different crime than terrorism. You said in your original post, like, you don't want to sound hyperbolic, but that this NSPM 7 is essentially a declaration of war on anyone who doesn't support the Trump administration and its agenda. Can you talk about what you meant by that?

Yeah. When I first wrote it, I said a declaration of war on the left, but then I reflected on it and looked at those indicators again, I thought, it's more than just the left. When you say non-traditional families, that could be like my Indian friend who happens live with his parents, because that's culturally, you know, what his family does. That could be bachelors. This is just everyone who isn't a certain brand of conservative, I guess. And again, it's right there in the document. This is not interpretive. This is like what they explicitly said. God only knows what the classified versions of this directive floating around in the White House are. Well, since the Charlie Kirk murder, there's been just this persistent myth that like most of the violence in America is perpetuated by the left and the violent left.

And it's, I mean, we don't even know full details of the Charlie Kirk's, you know, shooter's political ideology. And I understand obviously what happened to Charlie Kirk was like, you know, this national news. But it just seems like it's getting harder and harder to even understand people's political ideologies because there's so many different factions of even the right, much less. the left, like the entire American political system just seems more and more fragmented. Yeah, totally. And federal law enforcement is swinging this sledgehammer around, thinking they're going to hit like this one group as opposed to, you know, recently the FBI had a term. They called it salad bar ideology because they had so many problems placing individual trances of ideological groups. And so that gives you a sense of not just how difficult

their task is, but how recklessly federal law enforcement is going to respond to things like this when, because they're not going to come to it with the nuance that you just described. and a nuanced viewpoint that I think if you just think of anyone in one's daily life, people don't fit neatly into these categories. And so I think there should be a lot of skepticism that we approach. I mean, the whole point of terrorism is like, we're going to throw out civil liberties because something is so scary and so dangerous that we need to prevent it from happening. Now, if you're talking about a nuclear dirty bomb or something like that, there's an argument

for that. I'm still skeptical, but there's an argument for that. But if you're talking about like one guy breaks a window or sets a Tesla on fire, there's no argument for that among anyone reasonable. And so, yeah, the point you're making. is basically to say that none of these indicators are going to work because people's views don't fit neatly into these categories. Right. It basically just creates this permission structure to target anyone at any time because you can sort of find anybody, even people in the MAGA right,

that, you know, if they decide to speak out against power, I'm sure that you could apply some of these categories to them. This is so terrifying to me. And like you said, it's almost parity level. Like it's almost hard to take it seriously. But this is also not been significantly covered in the mainstream media. And I'm wondering why. Part of it is that it's national security, it's difficult, like we were talking about before. There were false reports of it being an executive order, partly because it came two days after the Antifa Domestic Terrorism designation. But I think a big part of it is this triangulation by the major media to want to be reasonable. And so we're not playing into hysteria and we're not going to fall for blah, blah, blah. And it's like, it seems sort of

arbitrarily wielded because they freak out about, just to give you an example. Do you remember all these stories about the Pentagon meeting with Heg Seth and everything? And he obviously said all these crazy things. But there was this like through line of it that it's going to be like, oh, it's going to be the purges and it's going to be a coup or something. They totally ran with that story, and none of it happened. And nobody thought any of that was going to happen. On the other hand, I don't know if it's like they're trying to compensate and say, like, look at how responsible we're being by not freaking out about this. And many of them make the point that I said earlier, which is, oh, there's no domestic terrorism designation. So therefore, there's nothing to worry

about here. But again, it misunderstands how these investigations work. Okay, that means you can't charge domestic terrorism. Doesn't mean you can't open an investigation in terrorism because the FBI already has an entire section dedicated to domestic terrorism. Right. You can, you can open these investigations. You can surveil everyone. You can harvest their data. You can stock them.

You can. And you can find then a reason that is under the, you know, sort of like specific, more narrower guidelines to charge them. Like, that's just obvious. It seems like also the administration keeps claiming that we're seeing this like tsunami of terrorism. Yeah. Cash Patel testified before Congress just a couple of weeks ago that there's been a 300% increase

in domestic terrorism. cases opened by the FBI, which should be concerning in itself for civil liberties, but also what is it that they're looking at? And then ICE claims to see a 1,000% increase in assaults against ICE officers. So this is very clearly a line that not just they're pushing, but I think they believe internally as well, based on my own reporting. I think they really buy this stuff. NSPM 7 could also affect nonprofits, right? In terms of like, I think there's worries that some of these nonprofits could be viewed as financing terrorism, again, because they're supporting things like LGBTQ rights and that could be seen as like radicalism on gender. Yeah, the directive

explicitly tells the Treasury Department to go and monitor nonprofit groups that they think are supporting, you know, these indicators we're talking about before. And we're already seeing the result of that, which is that a number of prominent DC law firms have instructed their clients to pay attention to this memo, make sure that what you're doing and saying doesn't fall afoul of it. And so what you're seeing already is self-censorship on the part of who knows how many NGOs that are getting this advice and saying, hmm, maybe we better be careful about this. And so there's a whole spectrum of ways in which this memorandum can affect speech. And at the extreme end, is like the arrests by the joint terrorism task forces. But at the beginning of this of the continuum,

we're already seeing it, which is groups self-censoring at the advice of their legal counsel to avoid being audited by the Treasury Department. You can imagine all kinds of things that don't rise to the level of kicking in a door that are going to, you know, have deleterious effects on speech. All right, Ken. Well, thank you so much for all of your coverage of this. And I can't wait to read more about NSPM 7 and all of the terrible national security directives that I'm sure Trump is going to be involved in. Thanks for me, Taylor. One of these days, I'll have good news for us. That's it for this week's Free Speech Friday. If you like my work, please subscribe to my Patreon via the link below or buy a paid subscription to my internet culture newsletter, UserMag. That's at usermag.com. Every single dollar helps. I have no sponsorships currently on this channel. So every ounce of your support means so much. Thanks so much.

And I'll be back next week for a brand new episode of Free Speech Friday.